There was a town that was once the victim of a witch that could make someone disappear should they not answer her riddle correctly. They said that she would put a spell on someone when they slept and in the middle of the night, and they would have no control over their body. They’d be forced to go to the forest where she lived and have to answer her riddle. After that, they would never be seen again. Everyone lived in fear of who would be next.
In that town, there was a boy that had been orphaned in a house fire that killed both of his parents. Since then, there were those who called him a cursed child, that he was doomed to harm anyone that was close to him. But there were also those that treated him with kindness and compassion. They would allow the boy a place to sleep, food to eat, and would even pay him to do their chores for them. Although he was still mistreated, he was at least being cared for by those who mattered to him.
As time went on, more and more people started to disappear. People of the village grew frightened by the possibility that they could be next. The boy saw that this was affecting the kind people that had taken care of him, and he felt he needed to help them solve this problem. So in the middle of the night, he went to the forest. There he saw one of the men that had cursed him and had been nothing but awful to the boy, walked out of his house and was heading toward the woods.
The boy ran after the man, stood in his way, and said, “Stop, I will go in your stead.”
The man woke up from the trance he had been put under and stared at the boy, not seeming to realize what he just did for him. The boy turned back toward the forest, not waiting to hear if the man was going to say anything. The boy followed the trail that had formed from all of the people that had come before him, all heading to their deaths at the witch’s cottage. When he was nearing her home, he could smell the distinct scent of burnt flesh and hair, a smell he was all too familiar with. When he arrived at her hut, he saw smoke rising from the brick chimney into the night sky. At the front of the cabin, there sat the witch herself in a creaky rocking chair.
The front lawn was full of dead weeds that had overgrown over time. The wood of the house was already rotting from the bugs that had eaten away at it. The woman glanced at him from her porch and seemed to be waiting for him to join her. The boy passed through the high weeds without a second thought and found himself face to face with her. She gestured for him to sit across from her in a chair that was made of a similar wood that she sits in now, a deep black with creases of brown.
“You’re cooking the bodies of your victims,” the boy stated flatly, not wanting to show weakness to her.
The old woman put on a sly smile. “Yes, well, everyone has to eat, don’t they?”
There was a pause between them, where the boy noticed the sharpness of her teeth in her grin. The witch was intrigued by the young boy, so she decided to make their little exchange a bit longer.
“Before I tell you my riddle, tell me, boy; why do you wish to help them? I have seen the way they have treated you, as if you are the very dirt they walk on. Why don’t you wish harm on them?” Asked the witch, curious as to what the boy might answer.
“I could know the answer to your riddle. To keep it to myself would mean to let more people die while I allow it,” replied the boy.
“People that have hurt you.”
“I’d be no better than those that did me wrong if I made the whole town pay the price for those people,” A shadow passed over the boy’s face, “and I would rather face death himself than become like them.”
The witch understood what the boy meant but knew that if she was faced with the same decision he was, she would not have been so noble. She got up from her chair and started to make her way down the steps. She looked up only to see a flash of movement and an immediate pain at her side; she didn’t realize what had happened until she looked down at the blood pouring out from her side. She stumbled to the ground as her blood stained the tall weeds. She looked up to see the boy she thought had a heart of gold, holding a knife with her blood dripping from it. He stared down at her with a blank look, not a single trace of guilt. She tried to get away from him, to get up, to do something, but soon realized her attempts were in vain as darkness began to creep into the edges of her eyes. Seconds later, she layed on the ground still as stone.
The boy walked out of the dry weeds of the witches’ front lawn with her blood on his hands, forever stained no matter how many times he could wash them. He looked back at where he left her and was saddened that it had come to that. There was no guarantee that he would know the answer to the riddle she was going to offer him, and if he had gotten it wrong, it would have all been a futile sacrifice on his part.
Loud groans and moaning came from the house accompanied with sharp snapping and cracking. The boy stared as hundreds and hundreds of beetles spilled out from the bottom of the ground and engulfed the entire cottage. Every inch the boy could see was covered with a thick blanket of beetles. They swarmed the front of the lawn, and he didn’t realize what they were doing until he heard the chorus of clicking, rattling and splintering. In a matter of seconds, the beetles flew from the top of the shack, leaving nothing where the house once stood. More and more groups of beetles left, making chunks of the house simply vanished. The weeds disappeared as if they’ve never been there at all. The buzzing of small bugs had gotten so jarring and tumultuous, the boy struggled against covering his ears but thought better than to make any sudden moves in fear that the bugs would move on to him next.
As sudden as the beetles had appeared, they left and took off in a hoard into the night. Nothing was left. Not the cottage, not the weeds, and not the body of the witch. There was only the barren land.
The town would have welcomed him and called him a hero for killing the witch. However, when the boy walked back into the forest, he never found his way back to the town. No one knows what happened to him. Had the witch cursed him to never find his home again? Had he gone mad with guilt over what he had done? Or is he still out there, waiting for a witch to come back to those woods so he could protect his village once again?